Posted by crazystengel on 8/30/2015 10:41:00 PM (view original):
Anybody else here a fan of the late Tony Judt?  His writing touched on a lot of what's being discussed here.   "Ill Fares the Land" in particular is a great collection of essays...

I'm generally not a fan of Keynesians, but I do like a lot of his historical work (which, I admit, is the majority).

I studied with Judt very briefly in New York - one semester of graduate school before I transferred somewhere else. He was very personable and gave students a lot of his time. I liked his work mostly, and was especially a fan of a piece he wrote that he later (when I met him) admitted to regretting having written, an attack on the late Charles Tilly, whom I had studied with for years earlier and could not stand. It was called "A clown in royal purple" and was published in History Workshop if I remember correctly, or possibly Radical History Review. Devastating and on the mark in my view, but I am bitter that way. 

Three quick replies to pinotfan's reply to my post about the constructive role of government historically:

1) most of your replies my friend are that private enterprise could not do this stuff before a certain decade of a certain century. Precisely, so civilization cannot be credited to private enterprise and even if you want to now credit it that is only from perhaps the industrial revolution on, not before, and we have a lot of before. 

The lesson is, we can have civilization without private enterprise and certainly without corporations since we almost always have until recently. 

2) The Cato Institute is not, as our colleagues have correctly pointed out, a neutral, academic, scholarly, serious source for anything. It is a highly ideologized think tank with a political agenda. I could as easily cite studies from the Communist Party in the other direction and they would have about as much seriousness to them. 

3) I wrote: Governments invented writing, math, civilization itself,

You replied: " No, people did.  People got together to form civilizations (and governments) after the development of agriculture, which enabled permanent settlements.  Writing/math were created by ‘businessmen’ as a way of tracking inventory and accounts.  Writing and math pre-date civilization and, ergo, government. "

Aside form that fact that if Napoleon or Julius Caesar (government) did something we could still say " a person or people did this" and so it is really not saying much of anything, your more serious point about a "businessman's" method of tracking inventory misses the point that these were either of two institutions - the palace or the temple - organized government or its near equivalent in organized religion, that invented these, organized them, and diffused their use. They did so for the very reason you mention - to keep track of who owed taxes, to whom land or resources had been loaned to carry out a project on contract with the State or Temple, and so on - as Karl Polanyi and others have shown and as all the sources from ancient Sumeria and Egypt make clear. 
So government (and temple) invented business practices as well as writing, math and organized civilization. Well done.